Saturday, March 04, 2006

Article points out the obvious: Free food ends up in the black market, being sold for profit...and feeding school age kids won't stop most malnutrition deaths and physical/intellectual damage which is caused by malnutrition in the womb and early childhood...

LACK of food is not usually the main cause of malnutrition among children in poor countries, the World Bank says. And large, politically popular programs to feed them are the wrong way to tackle the problem, it says....

The focus should be on teaching mothers to properly feed and care for babies and toddlers, it says.

The bank's recommendations will be controversial at a time when the world is pushing to halve poverty in the next decade and school feeding programs are often seen as part of the solution ...

Nutritionists at the bank say programs should emphasise changing the behaviour of mothers - for example, to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and to seek quick treatment for their children's diarrhoea and other common childhood illnesses, rather than directly providing food.

This is what we did with our "under fives" clinics....You see, except when there is actual food shortage, often young children cannot digest adult food...They need breast milk for two years...so get rid of all those "feed baby( expensive imported) baby formula...and insist on breast milk.Since if mom gets pregnant, her milk decreases, encourage supplementing the traditional sexual abstinence of breast feeding women with birth control....the pill decreases breast milk but Depo Provera actually increases it...Most people in Zim eat maize based sadza. Encourage more easily digested grains for the kids.These grains also are great to grow when the rains are not enough for maize...but the yield is not as good, so are planted less...Import baby chicks and teach classes in caring for them...most chickens are free range in villages, and the eggs get lost. Teach them to make chicken coops...so they will have eggs for dad and the chickens (in African culture, the man gets the best food...this is not cruel, since if he dies, everyone dies...but if you get a half dozen chickens you will have more than one egg, and everyone can get nutrition).We also had a "rabbit raising" class for our school kids.Finally, we had village health workers, to screen for malnutrition and to treat diarrhea with cheap, effective WHO rehydrating solution.Have baby clinics to give out shots.And have a "nutrition" center, for moms to live as outpatients while we feed up the "at risk" kids...you see, if you wait until he has kwashiorkor or marasmus, and he gets sick, you'll spend a fortune on medicine and he'll probably die anyway...

Oh yes: When there is actual famine, have the churches and NGO's give food personally...not the governments.